CAPE 2005: Without Warning First Look

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Learn to warp time and space with this new and inventive shooter.

By Ed Lewis

It's been confirmed that guys can get tired of looking at a woman's butt for a prolonged period of time. The woman in question is Lara Croft and the guys are the folks over at Circle Studio, a new development team comprised of a healthy chunk of Core. After a good seven years of tomb raiding they've moved on to create Without Warning, a game that concerns a chemical plant, the terrorists who want to destroy said chemical plant, and some covert operatives that want to destroy the terrorists. And that's the easy part of comprehending a game that plays a little fast and loose with some the typically linear structure of time.

All of the action in Without Warning takes place over the course of a 12-hour period. The terrorists have infiltrated the chemical plant and the three-man team gets inside to take them down. Along the way there are three civilians that play a role in the operation as well. One is a security guard, another is a secretary, and the third is a cameraman who survived a crash in his news chopper after it was hit by a surface-to-air missile from the terrorists. The cameraman wants to get the story and survive while everyone else wants to get out of there and save as many hostages spread across the plant as possible.

So there are six playable characters in all, but the trick is that none of them really interact with each other directly. The timeline is somewhat similar to that of Siren where after completing one task for one character the clock will get wound back and another character needs to be controlled. After this job is done the clock gets wound back to someone else who then goes a little further on in the future and so on. There will be several times where characters see others or the results of their actions during their own segment, such as seeing a firefight from afar, but actually interacting directly would create a time paradox whereupon the universe shrinks into a singularity and life ceases as we know it.

One thing to keep track of is that the game does not follow real time, but instead the time segments that are being done in the game are more open. In other words the individual goal of a character can be done in 10 minutes or 30 minutes, but if the allotted time for all of this is 20 minutes, then that's what the clock is going to show at the end of the mission. This is done to keep the storyline as a whole on track and not stretch the original 12-hour period into 20.

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As is to be expected the soldiers are the ones who have the firepower and thus receive the majority of the gameplay. The civilians will rely more on stealth and the ability to run away when they need to. They'll provide a break in the gameplay and make things more interesting all around, but when it's all said and done it's about shooting lots of terrorists and playing the big heroes.

To get the experience of fighting across, Circle Studio prepared a short demo level for us where we played as Jack Hooper, the youngest member of the team. This involved running around in tunnels, shooting at enemies with a machine gun, zooming in to snipe, and even exploding a barrel or two. In short, it's pretty much what you'd expect of any game of the genre, but the best part is that it looks very good doing it and is nice and comfortable for jumping right into. There was not much to see in terms of how the overall game will turn out from the demo, but at the very base level Without warning already feels good.

One thing that we also noticed is that there's a fair amount of things to interact with in the environment as well. By linking reactions with textures, Circle Studio has been able to dictate an items reaction by the way it looks. This means that if an entire steam pipe is covered with the same steam pipe texture, then any part of it can be shot to see steam coming out of it. The same technique is applied to other areas as well. It's a background addition, to be sure, but still a nice touch.

And with a release date set sometime in the fall of this year we're definitely curious to see how all of this time-shifting is going to work out after all. With the experience the Circle Studio has we're sure that they know what they're doing, but we still want to see the evidence because it could be very fun. And who doesn't like fun? That's like hating Bill Cosby or something.